Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Links

On setters, constructors and modelling reality "In my experience there are almost no situations where a setter method is a good idea...I often see setters used where information relating to an object is not known at construction time, and needs to be added later. This is usually a symptom of choosing the wrong class to store that data...Note that just because all the fields are final and there are no setters, this doesn't mean that the object is immutable. It just means that its behaviour more closely models reality, and your interactions with it will be far more meaningful."

Agile Development: Schema Evolution "One of the characteristics of agile development is that designs are often refactored. As result, the data model may evolve during the lifetime of a project. What happens if the data model of the db4o databases is changed?"

Smalltalk to Java - the Good, the Bad, and the Unbelievably Ugly "The Smalltalk code was "too Smalltalky" for the translation (again, design is language specific IMHO). They had DNU handlers, descendants from nil, #perform, etc. Then there's the whole utility class issue - final classes in Java (String, Date) that would simply be subclassed in Smalltalk. Joshua Bloch, call your office :/"

Running Code Doesn't Lie "This statement pretty much sums up why agile software development practices like eXtreme Programming and Getting Real are so powerful. Instead of business analysts or programmers writing pages of documentation for what they think the system does, the system tells you what it does. I like to call this a Self Describing System."

Multi-core Processors: transputers reborn "In the Eighties, there were only a small number of people who were interested in fast drawing of Mandelbrot sets. The same is true today. But today, everyone is interested in having their web sites scale well in terms of performance and in terms of price. The killer application of parallel computing is all around us. It is called the Web."